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Sunday, July 03, 2011

Bacteria Flagellum and other topics - the ball is back in your court! Fourth of July Creationist fireworks for you!

Jonathan Sarfati is my favorite creation scientist and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. My challenge to read a technical paper on flagellum in bacteria and possible steps up to the magnificent e. coli flagellum, one of those irreducible systems Michael Behe highlighted in his groundbreaking book "Darwin's Black Box." But then I saw that Darwinists have not really made new arguments. That there are all sorts of systems like that particular system doesn't begin to present a means by which less complex systems went UPHILL but is much better evidence for less complex systems going the other way. But then again, there are at least ten different basic eye structures and Darwinists have given up hope that they could be linked. In any event, this article does argue for the evidence that that particular system is irreducible and not able to develop in step-by-steps as Darwinists seek to assert. My linked article from Creation.com below the break will not only explain this but 23 other Evolutionist Myths and Misconceptions. You will also discover that Jonathan and I disagree on a couple of small points. Since Jonathan is smarter than I am, he might be right.

Yep, Jonathan Sarfati is smarter than I am. Since I test out at 99% percentile that is not necessarily a common occurrence. My famous friend Kevin is also smarter than I am. He doesn't care to admit it but he and I both know it is true. I have a son who, when we took an IQ test online, finished within one or two points of me which would be within the plus/minus parameters of error and leaves the real possibility he is smarter than me. Then I can name three engineers who were my students in the last decade who are also all smarter than me. I happen to know more about creation science than all of them but Jonathan, they all kick my butt in math and while my non-fans will not believe it, I love hanging out with smart people and I am never jealous of brains more mega than mine. In fact I look for them, seek them out, look to learn from them and get a huge kick out of talking "geek" with them.

Then I also get to work in the IT industry and I have a long list of acronyms I could put behind my name from technical certs and I can frankly tell you most of those things mean nothing to the real IT pros. Too many certs can be gained by cheating or obtained with an ability to test well but not translate to the field. Not all, hey you Cisco guys, I always respect a CCSE! Anyway, talking I/O requests and VM capabilities and proper Server certifications is fun. But also running into some real pioneers happen. Last week I got to meet one of the mechanical engineers who was at Stanford wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay back when they said, "Hey, let's make computers. He was writing assembly code and perl and designing hardware requirements and late was part of the aerospace industry. Now retired, he was helping his network administrator son-in-law (one of my clients) who had a problem with a big honking server upon which the entire company depends. He described the problem from an unusual perspective for IT that really took us a step ahead on the solution ladder.

Not long ago I met another veteran assembly code ( think: this is the base code for computers) programmer. When you write in base or assembly code you can write a program with less lines of code but it is tricky to do. Now she is pretty far up the IT ladder and no longer even writes code of any kind. In fact I came into the industry on the tech side and found it is amazing how much talent there is all over the world, people who do one job but have capabilities to do others in this industry. But talent is not how the world goes around. Relationships, that is the ticket. I make relationships in business with clients and with vendors and with sales reps and tech engineers and channel people and management people and then they pop up moving to a new job and we start doing business in a new way. Or they lose their job and ask me for a reference. Or they change industries and we might never work together again but now and again a phone conversation or a facebook message or email comes.

My heart goes out to the guys who have to wear ten hats because the IT department downsizes due to the economy and they are genuinely struggling to keep it together. Some of my clients had to go out of business. One of them stuck me with a bill that won't get paid. One of the most famous hospitals in California flat cheated us out of software, refused to pay and dared us to go to court, knowing they could get the venue in their backyard and that the time and attorney fees and hassle would be worse than taking the rip-off. So, yeah, there are crooked people in IT, too. Scammers. Liars. But there are enough good folks that I still love the relationship side of things. Hate dealing with red tape and hate it when CDW and businesses like that commoditize a product so no one gets any margin.

This weekend, though, I am dealing with political people and government officials, local mostly, who are becoming friends. I am considering a position with a campaign in order to help the candidate if I can get enough volunteers to pledge their help. My wife and I are working in the big July weekend festival we have here. Manning a booth, taking signatures, passing stuff out, trying not to die from heat prostration, the usual stuff...

Relationships. Community. People. God. Country. These are part and parcel of our lives, these are things of great importance. Money ranks lower. I made good money last month. I hope I have my best year ever, which would be miraculous in the Obameconomy, But if I even get close, relationships will be a big reason.

My candidate might win the primary. If he does, I am pretty sure he'll win in the general election. God and Country would get a boost. He is real, he is kind, he is very smart and he knows our government's laws and flaws. He has been a star in his current office and would have been a slam dunk for re-election but then we were clamoring for him to aim even higher and be another Mr. Smith goes to Washington, only with more experience. He is quite good at making relationships rather than deals and bringing people together instead of seeking out a few powerful allies. Kind of the opposite of the typical slimy politician.

Modern evolution

Published: 18 December 2008(GMT+10)

Ed. Note: this is the fourth instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist anti-creationist diatribe (see introduction and index page). This one deals with the widespread confusion between evolution and natural selection, which is actually a process discovered by creationists and an important part of the creation model.

Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution

Image Wikipedia.org

Modern evolutionary theory is built on some—but not all—of Darwin’s ideas, but has gone far beyond them

It is often assumed that biologists eagerly embraced Darwin’s theory about the origin of species when he unveiled it, and that scientists continue to accept all his ideas to this day.

We have made this point as well, e.g. Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus Darwin proposed a theory of evolution, and it was proposed millennia before that by some ancient Greek philosophers.1 E.g. Anaximander (611–547 BC) argued that humans evolved from fish or fishlike forms, and Empedocles (493–435 BC) claimed that we arose by chance combinations of atoms. He even proposed a form of natural selection, whereby those combinations best suited to survive would pass on their offspring.2 Aristotle (384–322 BC) replied with the same argument of modern creationists today: that this fails to account for the origin of the first self-reproducing entity. The idea of long ages also has a long pagan history.

Yet many evolutionists admit that Darwin never produced actual evidence for the origin of species, as opposed to varieties, let alone different basic kinds.

Modern biologists see Darwin’s greatest contribution as the main mechanism he proposed: natural selection. During Darwin’s lifetime, however, many biologists were not convinced that it could account for evolution, and the idea fell out of favour.

In the 1930s, it was revived by population biologists, who proved that natural selection is a very powerful force driving evolutionary change (but not the only one). And with the development of genetics, biologists began to discover exactly how evolution takes place. This led to a new understanding of evolution, based on discoveries in many different fields, called the modern synthesis.

‘Historically, the entire field of population genetics was developed by a small, tightly knit group of people radically committed to the Primary Axiom [that all life had a single common ancestor]. They were free to explore many scenarios and adjust multiple parameters unconstrained by objective calibrations, and to optimize frameworks to appear internally consistent. Their mathematical approach was to define the unit of selection as discrete genetic units, such a gene or nucleotide, instead of whole organisms with all the contradictory influencing factors (p. 52).
‘For the most part, other biologists do not even understand their work—but accept their conclusions “by faith”’ (p. 46). The theorists’ models can be shown to never have matched biological reality to the minimal degree expected of useful models, but these men were undeniably intelligent and had an incredible aura of intellectual authority (p. 53). In many ways they deserve our admiration, since transforming any scenario, correct or not, into an appropriate mathematical formulation requires a great deal of skill. One can also admire honestly the brilliant lawyer who argues ever so cleverly against the truth in his client’s interest. How we wish they would contribute their gifts within a correct paradigm!’

Modern evolution In many ways the modern synthesis is an extension and refinement of Darwin’s ideas, but there are also some important differences. In particular, some evolution is now attributed to genetic drift.

Haeckel’s drawings of the eating habit and reproductive cycle of an alleged Moneron to which he gave the scientific name, Protomyxa aurantiaca, as published in his book The History of Creation. The extent of the detail is the measure of his fraud, as the Monera did not then and do not now exist!

Genetic drift is a good way to drive devolution by eliminating genes by chance—even beneficial mutations. Most mutations have small effects and the rare beneficial ones will mostly give a small selective advantage. This is expressed by the selection coefficient s. If a mutation has s = 0.001 or 0.1%, a supposedly typical value, then the number of surviving offspring is 0.1% greater for organisms with the mutation than without it. But the smaller the selective advantage, the more likely that random effects (e.g. genetic drift) will eliminate it—its probability of survival is about 2s.3 So the above mutation has only one chance in 500 of surviving, even though it is beneficial.

Even if a beneficial mutation survives, for it to become fixed in a population (that is, all individuals have it, so it cannot be lost), the organisms not carrying it must be eliminated. This is the cost of substitution. This limits the amount of substitution which can occur in a given time. This is known as Haldane’s Dilemma,4 after J.B.S. Haldane, one of the world’s leading evolutionists (and a Stalin-supporting communist for a while). He wanted evolution to work, but couldn’t get around his dilemma.

Take a population of 100,000. If only a male and female pair have the new trait, natural selection must eliminate the other 99,998 and all their heirs. If there is perfect selection (s = 1), this can happen in one generation. But this means that for every new trait, 49,999 individuals must be eliminated without offspring. Then the population must be regenerated with these survivors.

Anyway, even if evolution happened at the maximum speed (s = 1) for 10 million years, how many traits could be substituted in a creature with human-like generation times of say 20 years? Only 500,000. This small number of nucleotides is only a small fraction of the forty or more 500-page books worth of information (120 million base pairs) which are needed to transform an ape into a man. And in real life, selection is far less intense, meaning that only about 1700 substitutions could occur.5

While Darwin was right about most things, he also made a fair few mistakes. The biggest was his hypothesis of ‘pangenesis’, described in detail in his 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. According to this theory, beneficial characteristics acquired during the life of an organism could be passed onto offspring over the course of several generations, thanks to particles called ‘gemmules’ shed by body cells that became concentrated in the reproductive organs.

Darwin thought this could explain, for instance, why children are born with thicker skin on the soles of their feet than elsewhere, but this idea was dismissed in the 20th century. There’s a twist in this tale, though: a few biologists now think there might be ways for traits acquired during an organism’s lifetime to be passed on. However, it has yet to be proved that this can happen and, even if it can, it is very much the exception rather than the norm.

Actually, such promoters of neo-Lamarckian face censorship from guardians of the neo-Darwinian paradigm, as Professor Evelleen Richards, Science Historian, University of NSW, pointed out.

Darwin’s other mistakes are more trivial. For instance, in one edition of Origin of Species, Darwin enthused about ‘Eozoon canadense’, which had been identified as a primordial microorganism by others but whose ‘fossils’ turned out to be nothing more than mineral formations.

…The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complexActually, flagella vary widely from one species to another, and some of the components can perform useful functions by themselves. They are anything but irreducibly complex
It is a highly complex molecular machine. Protruding from many bacteria are long spiral propellers attached to motors that drive their rotation. The only way the flagellum could have arisen, some claim, is by design.

Each flagellum is made of around 40 different protein components. The proponents of an offshoot of creationism known as intelligent design argue that a flagellum is useless without every single one of these components, so such a structure could not have emerged gradually via mutation and selection. It must have been created instead.

In reality, the term ‘the bacterial flagellum’ is misleading. While much remains to be discovered, we now know there are thousands of different flagella in bacteria, which vary considerably in form and even function.

This is supposed to be an argument for evolution? If there was only one type of flagellum, then ‘common ancestry’ would be invoked, and used as proof of evolution. Now different varieties of flagellum are also proof of evolution? Once again, heads I win; tails you lose.

Different strokes The best studied flagellum, of the E. coli bacterium, contains around 40 different kinds of proteins. Only 23 of these proteins, however, are common to all the other bacterial flagella studied so far. Either a ‘designer’ created thousands of variants on the flagellum or, contrary to creationist claims, it is possible to make considerable changes to the machinery without mucking it up.

What’s more, of these 23 proteins, it turns out that just two are unique to flagella. The others all closely resemble proteins that carry out other functions in the cell. This means that the vast majority of the components needed to make a flagellum might already have been present in bacteria before this structure appeared.

Dr Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho, a world expert on the flagellar motor, disagrees with the evolutionary story tellers, who have far less expertise in the area than he does. He says that his belief that this motor has been intelligently designed has given him many research insights. Minnich points out that the very process of assembly in the right sequence requires other regulatory machines.8 He also points out that only about 10 of the 40 components can possibly be explained by co-option, but the other 30 are brand new.

It has also been shown that some of the components that make up a typical flagellum —the motor, the machinery for extruding the ‘propeller’ and a primitive directional control system—can perform other useful functions in the cell, such as exporting proteins.

New Scientist is referring to the type III secretory system (TTSS) in some disease germs. But this is more likely to be a degeneration from the flagellum. It’s not surprising that complex machinery could be adopted to simpler uses; e.g. a TV with a blown CRT tube could still be used as an audio system like a radio, but it wouldn’t mean that a TV evolved from a radio.

It’s not surprising that complex machinery could be adopted to simpler uses; e.g. a TV with a blown CRT tube could still be used as an audio system like a radio, but it wouldn’t mean that a TV evolved from a radio.

Minnich says that although the flagellum is more complex, it came first, so it couldn’t have been derived from the secretory apparatus.9 This makes sense: The flagellum assembly mechanism is designed to punch out the proteins required for the flagellum in a very orderly way. If this is disabled, it can punch out proteins (including toxins) in a haphazard way, as the TTSS does.

For example, the flagellum is formed base-first. Then an export apparatus forms to make a hole in the cell wall, then expel the right proteins in the right place through a hollow tube, and these proteins must be labelled to distinguish them from non-flagellar proteins. Some of these proteins must be shepherded by other proteins called chaperones.

Then the ‘hook’ or universal joint must form. This requires a ‘hook cap’ protein to keep the components in place as the hook is built. Then the cap detaches and floats away.

Finally, the actual whip must form. This is a hollow tube comprising tens of thousands of copies of the protein, flagellin. This must be sent by the export apparatus and squeezed through the growing tube. But before this, a filament cap must be sent through. This is composed of five protein parts, so the whole is shaped something like a starfish on stilts.10

The flagellum itself comprises 11 strands, while the legs of the cap can fit in a crease between every other strand. But with only five legs, there is one crease unfilled. But this is all part of the coordination. As a new flagellin protein arrives, the cap stops it from floating away and allows it to fold into its functional shape, and it is then directed to the unfilled space. This filling rotates the cap so that the next available slot is now unfilled by one of the legs. So the next flagellin also arrives at the right spot. This process repeats tens of thousands of times, so each flagellin is automatically directed to the right spot. It is an amazing example of precision, nano-scale engineering.11

Changing zooms
It has been proposed that the flagellum originated from a protein export system. Over time, this system might have been adapted to attach a bacterium to a surface by extruding an adhesive filament. An ion-powered pump for expelling substances from the cell might then have mutated to form the basis of a rotary motor. Rotating any asymmetrical filament would propel a cell and give it a huge advantage over non-motile bacteria even before more spiral filaments evolved.

Lots of just-so story-telling here. As Minnich says, this is better explained by degeneration of the flagellum, which would still leave some useful functions. Worst of all, New Scientist contradicts their own evolutionary experts. Evolution teaches that bacteria evolved before the plants and animals that they could parasitize. But they always had to swim, so it makes sense that the swimming machinery preceded the secretion machinery that would be needed only once multicellular life evolved so the germs could parasitize them. Indeed, evolutionary specialists agree that the flagellum preceded the TTSS:

‘It seems plausible that the original type III secretion system for virulence factors evolved from those for flagellar assembly.’12
‘We suggest that the flagellar apparatus was the evolutionary precursor of Type III protein secretion systems.’13

So the TTSS origin theory is totally without merit, not only objectively but also within their own evolutionary framework. It is highly disingenuous for evolutionary propagandists to propose an explanation that defies even the best evolutionary theories, without telling the readers.14

Finally, in some bacteria flagella became linked to an existing system for directing movement in response to the environment. In E. coli, it works by changing flagella rotation from anticlockwise to clockwise and back again, causing a cell to tumble and then head off in a new direction.

Yes, somehow all this coordinated machinery became linked together. Nothing to it! Similarly, all you need to explain a car is wheels with motive power; coordinating them is just a trivial matter. [sarcasm]

Without a time machine it may never be possible to prove that this is how the flagellum evolved. However, what has been discovered so far—that flagella vary greatly and that at least some of the components and proteins of which they are made can carry out other useful functions in the cells—show that they are not ‘irreducibly complex’.

Yet the best evidence shows that the other functions are the result of degenerating the flagellar assembly machine.

More generally, the fact that today’s biologists cannot provide a definitive account of how every single structure or organism evolved proves nothing about design versus evolution.

This is a damaging admission that evolutionists do not have the mechanism they need to justify their materialistic dogma. And the situation is even worse than that. The evolutionary biochemist Franklin Harold, while wishing to maintain his a priori rejection of design, still admits:

‘We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity; we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.’15

Biology is still in its infancy, and even when our understanding of life and its history is far more complete, our ability to reconstruct what happened billions of years ago will still be limited.

I.e. we really still don’t have a clue, but that’s OK, we should still teach evolution as fact.

Think of a stone archway: hundreds of years after the event, how do you prove how it was built? It might not be possible to prove that the builders used wooden scaffolding to support the arch when it was built, but this does not mean they levitated the stone blocks into place.

Or one could consult written records of how it was done. But this very analogy gives the lie to the New Scientist nonsense: the archway is clearly designed by an intelligent human creator, even if there were no witnesses to this. The flagellum was clearly designed also. Even if the flagellum could have evolved from the secretory apparatus, the secretory apparatus itself defies evolutionary storytelling, let alone its transformation into a flagellum. Not even one of the ~30 new protein components for the flagellum could possibly have formed by chance (which they must have, because there is no step-wise process of increasing functionality that could possibly explain the origin of the flagellum by mutations and natural selection).

A better rule that avoids personifying an impersonal process is: God is cleverer than you are, hence the growing field of biomimetics.

Yet more creationist misconceptions

A lot of creationist misconceptions have already been noted by us on our ‘Arguments we think creationists should NOT use’ page, the 8th most read article on our site! If Le Page is unhappy that some creationists are still using them, he should direct them to our site!

A lot of them have already been noted by us on our ‘Arguments we think creationists should NOT use’ page, the 8th most read article on our site! If Le Page is unhappy that some creationists are still using them, he should direct them to our site!

Evolution is just a theory

Yes it is, like Einstein’s theory of special relativity. By theory, scientists mean an explanation backed by evidence. What creationists mean is that evolution is just a hypothesis, unsupported by evidence-which it is not. Evolution is a fact as well a theory.

If Einstein had recanted his theories on his deathbed, would the universe be any different? Scientific hypotheses stand or fall on the evidence, not on the whims of their proposers. But for the record, this myth, popular among creationists, is not true.

And it even links to a Creation magazine article, Did Darwin recant? but on another site. It’s a shame that Le Page doesn’t read more of our site, but then he would have little to write.

There are no transitional fossils

There isn’t a nice way of saying this: anyone making this claim is either appallingly ignorant or an outright liar. In fact, there are far too many fossils with intermediate features to count—trillions if you include microfossils.

If ‘transitional fossil’ is defined so loosely, then of course there are some. But what informed creationists point out is that evolution requires innumerable transitional forms linking one type of creature to another; all evolutionists can produce are a handful of disputed ones. The microfossil ‘transitions’ are unnamed, but one popular one involves single-shelled marine creatures called foraminifera, which usually have an easily preserved hard ‘test’ or shell. However, the ‘transitions’ are often not evolutionary at all, but reflect ecophenotypic change, i.e. variations in one species caused by different environments. One paper points out that different test thicknesses in different individuals are caused by different environmental conditions, then cautions:

‘Failure to take into consideration the particular characteristics of a group and the nature and degree of its variation may result in the artificial separation of many ‘morphological’ species on the basis of minor phenotypic variations, even when the population at a given locality or stratigraphic level contains the complete series of gradations between two or more of these. As these individuals represent minor portions of a continuous population, regardless of the method of reproduction, they represent a single biological species, for which subdivision is unwarranted.’

I.e. although these forms can be arranged in what looks like a transitional series between different forms, they are really just variants of one species.

These fossils show the transitions between major groups, from fish to amphibians, for instance, as well as from one species to another. New discoveries are continually made, from the half-fish, half-amphibian Tiktaalik to an early giraffe with a shorter neck than modern animals.

We have dealt with Tiktaalik and other alleged fish/tetrapod transitions like Gogonasus, Livioniana, Ventastega and Panderichthys. The transitional sequences are not all in order morphologically or stratigraphically, and many similarities cannot be explained by common ancestry but are dismissed as ‘homoplasies’ or ‘convergence’. Early giraffe is not named so it could be a throwaway bluff.

There are serious problems with the theory of evolution' Would you jump off a skyscraper on the basis that the clash between general relativity and quantum theory means there are serious problems with our theory of gravity? It makes no more sense to question the reality of evolution because scientists are still debating about some of its finer aspects than it does to question the existence of gravity for the same reason. There are still plenty of details to fill in but, as surely as dropped objects fall, life has and continues to evolve.

‘Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.’—Richard Dawkins''

Here’s the difference: we can observe objects falling and measure their acceleration. Gravity is measurable, testable science in the present. But as Dawkins said,

‘Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.’16

That is, evolution is an unobservable theory about history, about origins which happened in the past, which cannot be tested by experiment, unlike gravity. There is a world of difference between historical science and operational science.

If we all evolved from apes, why are there still apes around in this world?

Chihuahuas, great Danes and every other type of dog were bred from wolves, but there are still wolves in the world. And what breeders do deliberately can happen naturally: when a species splits into separate populations that cannot interbreed, these populations can evolve in very different ways. The emergence of a new species does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the old one, although in fact the apes we evolved from are long extinct—chimpanzees and gorillas are our cousins, not our ancestors.

Again, tell us something we don’t know. One gets the impression that Le Page is knowingly using straw man arguments as a polemical trick to make creationists look stupid. Evolutionists would cry ‘foul’ if we listed layman’s arguments for evolution, knocked them down and then made it appear that we had refuted evolutionary theory.

Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, a measure of randomness, cannot decrease in an isolated system. Our planet is not a isolated system.
Er, that’s it. There are longer ways of saying the same thing if you prefer.

The open system argument does not help evolution. Raw energy from outside Earth cannot generate the specified complex information in living things. Undirected energy just speeds up destruction. See open system canard.

Actually 2s/(1–e-2sN), where’s = selection coefficient and N is the population size. This asymptotically converges down to 2s where sN is large. So it’s much harder for large populations to substitute beneficial mutations. But smaller populations have their own disadvantages, e.g. they are less likely to produce any good mutations and are vulnerable to the deleterious effects of inbreeding. Return to text.

6 comments:

Jon Woolf
said...

Yep, Jonathan Sarfati is smarter than I am.

Were I you, Radar, that would worry me.

See that sketch of a sharp-faced, sharp-beaked, somewhat nasty-looking gent that heads Sarfati's article? The one that has no caption, but the text leads you to believe is a portrait of Charles Darwin?

It's not.

This is a portrait of Charles Darwin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Darwin_by_G._Richmond.jpg

Not even close to being the same guy.

In other words, Sarfati is so unfamiliar with Darwin that he didn't even know what Darwin looks like, and grabbed the wrong image without noticing the mistake.

[jokerlaugh.wav]

The rest of the Sarfati article is just SSDA - same stuff, different author. It's all been countered many times before.

Yep, Jonathan Sarfati is smarter than I am. Since I test out at 99% percentile that is not necessarily a common occurrence. My famous friend Kevin is also smarter than I am. He doesn't care to admit it but he and I both know it is true. I have a son who, when we took an IQ test online, finished within one or two points of me which would be within the plus/minus parameters of error and leaves the real possibility he is smarter than me. Then I can name three engineers who were my students in the last decade who are also all smarter than me.

So you've met 6 people who you think might be smarter than you?

“The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance.”

I'm disappointed. I was expecting some kind of intellectual heavy-weight. Instead, we get this:

"Take a population of 100,000. If only a male and female pair have the new trait, natural selection must eliminate the other 99,998 and all their heirs. If there is perfect selection (s = 1), this can happen in one generation. But this means that for every new trait, 49,999 individuals must be eliminated without offspring. Then the population must be regenerated with these survivors."

He appears to be entirely serious about this argument.

Sarfati may not be aware (though he should be) that Haldane's calculations have been considerably adjusted for errors since their initial publication in 1957. I wonder how he would address the revised calculations, and why he would waste time writing about an early version of Haldane's work - perhaps so he could have an easier time arguing against it.

As a hypothetical, it may well be consistent unto itself. What Sarfati is guilty of, however, is that he's playing with an outdated model of Haldane's Dilemma. His claims and misrepresenations are neatly taken apart here: http://www.gate.net/~rwms/haldane1.html

Now if this Woolf person has any substantive arguments against my article, instead of bluff, that would be amazing. Ig he bothered to look at the original http://creation.com/refutation-of-new-scientists-evolution-24-myths-and-misconceptions-modern-evolution, he would have known it was never claimed to be Darwin. Rather, right-click on it then "save image", and it says: "6214richard-owen" and it's to the right of the statement "Many biologists were staunch critics, e.g. Richard Owen and Johann Blasius." So can you now guess who it might be? Evidently this Woolf person was unaware.

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour